How to Improve Cashflow: Top Tips for Finance
Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business and when faced with uncertainty, it's essential to keep a tight handle on it. When it comes to your finance processes, if you're reliant on manual, paper-based steps, all the information you need is there, but finding it in a timely manner is hard. That means it’s hard to keep track of your cash flow – and even harder to improve it.
Automated finance processes can help by ensuring data flows into your systems automatically, saving you time. Plus, you’re able to analyse information much more easily with insights from accounting software that will help you improve cash flow. Let’s look in more detail at some of the ways finance automation could help improve your processes and, in turn, improve your cash flow.
Real Time Visibility into Your Data
Understanding where the cash is in your business is the critical element of cash flow. Finance automation gives you the real time visibility you need.
For example, automated expense processes smooths peaks and troughs in employee spend because it’s easier for employees to submit expense claims and allows the finance team to make reimbursements more quickly. It also speeds up accounts payable processes so you can reduce late payment fees from suppliers in the short term.
One SAP Concur customer reports how gaining more visibility in all aspects of their business, and having real time insight into their spend, was an important win for them.
Standard Reports Track Progress and Target Productivity
As a business owner or finance leader, the chances are you and the rest of the finance team need to know the same information every month. It’s true of every other department in the business too. With finance automation, standard reports can be generated automatically each month so you can spend more time on the analysis and less time on the data mining of your cash inflows and outflows.
For one SAP Concur customer the ability to generate standard reports automatically allowed them to achieve one of their critical targets: productivity and process improvements that would save them time they could spend on more important things such as driving their growth.
Transparency and Proactivity Deliver Action
For many businesses, the immediate access to cash flow information that finance automation and invoice software brings means they can do things that simply weren’t possible before. Information becomes much easier to share and allows managers to gain better insight. In SAP Concur you can set up bespoke dashboards so each department can access the reports that are relevant for them at the click of a mouse.
For example, managers can easily see how much they’re spending with a certain supplier, so they have the information they need to negotiate a discount. They’re also able to spot when spend is too high in a certain area so they can take steps to reduce it and cut costs appropriately.
For one SAP Concur customer, not having to report manually means they have more time for face-to-face meetings to look at opportunities to do more in the business. They also highlight how managers are increasingly seeing ways they can manage their own spend more effectively and making use of what real-time information has to offer. This allows them greater visibility into when to pay for products and services and to avoid late penalty fees.
Empowering Teams and Improving Morale
Finance automation frees up time for you to spend on the more important things. Research suggests the people responsible for processing expenses and invoices save over 15% of their time when finance automation is in place.
One SAP Concur customer reported that developing their people was a key growth priority. Having the system in place allowed them to broaden the team’s experience and give them new assignments because they were spending less time on manual processes.
Make Managing Cash Flow Easier
When cash is flowing smoothly through your business then your business is running smoothly. Finance automation makes it easier to monitor and manage cash flow so you’re able to make changes to improve it. If you would like to discuss how it could work in your business, contact SAP Concur today.
